


After Midnight

by TheSpaceCoyote



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Post SBURB, Post-Game, insecure Dave, lots of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-23
Updated: 2012-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-29 23:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpaceCoyote/pseuds/TheSpaceCoyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave knows that one day he's going to crack, that one day he's going to have to break down and cry on someone's shoulder and let out everything that's been pent up inside of him since the Game ended.</p><p>Good thing Dave also knows he'll always have John by his side</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> Just some silly little eventual fluff with emotionally insecure/post-game!Dave. Enjoy uwu

 

 

 

There is pain. There is pain like there is always pain. Post-game, pain is somewhat of an inevitability. There is pain when you stumble home on the weekends, drunk of your asses and you don't make it to the front door or your tipsy fingers can't manage to find the key in your pocket, so you sit together in the concrete stairwell. John hooks his elbow around your arm and noses into your shoulder, and there is pain there straight through your chest.

 

In those moments you feel as if you did at the very end of the Game, with everything behind you and nothing before you and only John Egbert at your side, holding your hand. There was pain then, too, at everything that you had lost, everything that had been destroyed and erased and sacrificed. The moments like that are when you want the most to disappear, or perhaps just be stuck in the perpetual dream bubbles of endless snow. Where you could throw yourself under a blanket of white and never come up.  

 

You want to love John so badly, you want to need him in the way he obviously needs you whenever you're both drunk and he clings to you out on the fire escape as you watch the red and white lines of cars race each other below. You want to rely on him in the way that he relies on you whenever he has a nightmare, or whenever the reality that his dad is gone and never coming back takes hold. You want him to hold you the way you hold him on those occasional moments that he breaks down, those instances of self-deprecation that John has the courage to share with you. 

 

But you can't. 

 

You can't love John the way he loves you because you're still a _kid_ who's scared shitless, a kid who is unconvinced that he could ever in a million years in a million theoretical timelines make any relationship work. John took his recovery from the game faster than you did. John had lost his childhood but he managed to bridge the gap. He'd managed to move on. And sure he had his bouts of weakness but he always managed to bounce back. The little drips of despair are enough to relieve the pressure inside John, to prevent a flood that could consume him. 

 

But you hadn't moved on. You had needed that time to grow up. You needed that time to be innocent and ironic and _stupid_ a little longer before you were thrust upon the adult world. Before you had to see the dead bodies of your bro and of you and worst of all of John. 

 

And yet, even with the crushing inevitability that someday, all of that pain and angst and anger and sorrow and _feelings_ is going to break your dam and coming pouring out of you, most likely flooding the poor citizens of Egbertville, you don't feel doomed. And while you're afraid of yourself, afraid of how you'll react when you finally don't have the layers of irony to protect you, you aren't all that worried about how John will respond, about whether the revelation that his best bro is as scared as any other sixteen-year-old on the planet will finally break him for good.  

 

Because John is stronger than you are. Because John can take it, John can support you when your foundation of cool crumbles. Because you know that John has known it all along, that he has some six-sense evil eye intuition going on where he knows there's more to you than a blank slate. Egbert once rode the skies, surely he can withstand the oncoming Strider storm of a feelings jam. 

 

So on the occasion when the two of you sneak up to the roof of your apartment, jimmying open the shitty lock and stepping out into the cool breath of the wind and John puts his arm around your waist, you throw one about his shoulders and draw him close and smile at the stars.  

 

It's stupid, and it's silly, and it's unorthodox and as uncoordinated as a drunken centipede, but damn it does Dave Strider and John Egbert's relationship work. 


End file.
